Present day trends in the electronic industry are towards miniaturazation and standardization of components. With small size, light weight, and overall ruggedness being requirements for portable devices, the problem must be solved of supplying peripheral and other expansion capabilities to small, general-purpose computing and consumer electronic devices. One solution to the problem is standardized memory and I/O cards to provide this expansion capability.
With the application of the products being the general consumer market, the products must be rugged and easy to use. It is within these constraints that peripheral cards must operate in order to solve interchangability and expandability problems.
With space being at a premium in portable products, it is often desirable to have the peripheral cards slide flush along printed circuit boards, and the like, during insertion and removal operations. This saves vertical space and the need for an additional horizontal guide surface is avoided. This configuration presents a problem, however, as the bottom edge of the peripheral card tends to stub against the peripheral card connector lead-in on present day known designs. Forming a sharp enough lead-in that will stay firmly on the circuit board has proved to be infeasible from a manufacturability viewpoint.
Clearly an urgent need exists, in the exploding portable electronics market, to provide a peripheral card header lead-in arrangement that will prevent stubbing during peripheral card insertion and removal operations and will also secure the peripheral card header firmly to the surface on which it is resident.